App Aware Security Monitoring: Real-World Use Cases and Benefits

Monitoring and analyzing application activity is critical for understanding how attackers interact with your software. Digital.ai App Aware provides real-time visibility into tampering, unsafe execution environments, and other adversarial behavior, giving security teams actionable data to protect app integrity and prioritize defenses.

The following use cases demonstrate how organizations are already leveraging App Aware to gain meaningful security insights and make data-driven protection decisions.

Understand the Threat Landscape for an Application

You can use App Aware data to build a high-level understanding about how threat actors are interacting with your application. Key insights include:

• What kinds of attacks are they using?
• How often are they running in unsafe environments?
• How often are they tampering with application integrity?
• Which regions, times, and devices are hotspots for threat actors?

Upcoming features such as personalized and global threat reports will provide overviews of your app’s security posture and allow comparisons with industry trends. Such an overview can help make decisions about how many engineering resources to invest in improving application security.

Collect App Analytics for Your User Base

App Aware captures both legitimate user behavior and threatening activity, including:

• User location, device type, operating system, and app version.
• How often users boot the application.

These statistics can help supplement data from telemetry and crash analytics tools which do not monitor threat actor behavior. The data can be viewed directly in App Aware dashboards or imported into a SIEM for analysis. This information can be used to help prioritize application development for maximum ROI.

Block App Features for Malicious Accounts

For applications with login or authentication mechanisms, App Aware enables linking data to account IDs, which allows you to associate App Aware users with app-specific accounts.

This allows you to target app-specific actions when accounts trigger tamper events, such as:

• Blocking all financial transactions.
• Preventing password or two-factor authentication changes.
• Flagging accounts for additional scrutiny in support tickets.
• Preventing any other high-risk behavior.

These actions can be automated by using the App Aware API to talk to a SIEM or application specific backend. The new App Aware classification features and web hooks make it easier than ever to identify the high-risk UAIs and take action against them.

Ban Malicious App Accounts

This use case is commonly found in video games, where repeated tampering may justify account bans. By linking account IDs to App Aware data, you can:

• Collect account names for users that triggered tamper events.
• Execute bans in waves every few weeks or months.

Performing bans in waves makes it harder for threat actors to adapt and understand how they were caught.

Decide When to Drop Support for Old Platforms

App Aware can help your teams assess when to discontinue support for older devices, operating systems, or browsers. Considerations include:

• How many users are on older platforms?
• What is the cost to maintain those platforms based on usage?
• Older platforms come with an increased security risk, with more jailbreaks and rootkits available for older devices.
• Frida and other hacking tools have better support for old devices.
• Older operating systems have fewer security features.

For these reasons, hackers tend to hold onto and target older devices. Combining usage data combined with security insights helps ensure that ending support reflects both business efficiency and reduced exposure.

Monitor New Protection Deployments

For customers that are concerned about impact to non-malicious users, App Aware enables report-only monitoring before enforcing actions. This approach prioritizes user experience while maintaining security vigilance.

When deploying new guards or guard configurations, you can minimize risk by implementing them in report-only mode first. This allows the guard to run and report to App Aware without triggering any tamper action that impacts the user.

This approach can reveal which users trigger a new guard without having triggered existing guards, which could mean that they are malicious actors who have found ways to bypass the existing guards. Knowing this builds confidence that non-malicious users are not impacted by the new guard, and you can then proceed with safely enabling more aggressive tamper actions, including crashes or custom responses.

Conclusion

These use cases demonstrate Digital.ai App Aware’s practical value in real-world security operations. From threat landscape analysis to strategic platform decisions, App Aware provides the visibility security teams need to make informed decisions. As application threats continue to evolve, having this level of insight becomes critical for maintaining effective defenses and user confidence.